I can't remember if it's ever come up how a big newish thing is what smart people expect their jobs to do for them - so much more than pay a living wage. Friends, meaning, status - the last is especially a bitch - all tied up in jobs. It's so fucking dumb.

If you have a marriage where you need your spouse to be your everything, that is a dead marriage walking. It will ruin almost everyone. And yet our culture has largely made it the default belief about career, for a certain breed of well-educated white-collar types. We've made a god of it, built an implicit infrastructure of worship around it. It's hard to think of something more poisonous that people don't taste as poison.

I'm now at the beginning of the fiendishly difficult endeavor of untangling all this. It's so fucking hard in ways I wouldn't have imagined when I was a newb. Maybe bc when you start out you swim up the gradient of more and it's progress you can feel. Once you get enough more that stops working. At least it has in my case.

I've always admired KK bc he seems to have become maximally himself, and with a bit of attention - not too much, it seems like - bent a working life around his own nature, and not the reverse. Not everyone has the privilege of being able to pull that off, but I think many could. Many who are reading this can. It gives me hope.

Wait, you're saying that people working in Hollywood having to hide that they were gay was a laudable state of affairs?

Advertising-based analogue of pay-to-post, with similar but unacknowledged virtues from the other side?

Thanks, will check this out. I like Hobart, he's a deep thinker. Useful to know how influential he is in Silicon Valley, whatever he says will get absorbed by the Lords of Creation and influence them in deep ways.

If you hit the "Read more" link at the bottom you get another chunk, but they're not very long, just a broad orientation to the topic. I found it most interesting for things I hadn't really thought much about.

Yeah. The question is, which of those actions is more entropic? After you shake the snow globe, where does the snow settle?

It's interesting to consider cars as a nice example given the role of tech and productivity gains in pushing prices DOWN; and yet it's the reverse. W debasement, and nothing else, I'd expect holding steady. Seems like there's scarcity / status effects at work - cars as baseball cards.

We are doomed.

Many wise words. The 80s has produced a generation of sages.

The symbolic is just as important as the technical. Slower for the effects to manifest in some cases, though.

This is the category of thing some of the proposed opcodes could really help with -- security even in the face of keys being possessed. Having complex spend conditions seems like a giant unlock. Hopefully we'll get there.

Also, periodic reminder that this is a social problem. But the more technical tools to deal w/ it the better, I guess.

I note that you are silent on the amount of peace it brought to her.

Ha, at first I thought you were referring to this book which I wholeheartedly endorse, if you're a writer; and which packs a similar philosophical punch, although less directly.

Duck typing > semantic pedantry.

All of this stuff, in the end, grounds out in what you think matters. There is no escaping the question, and if you don't explicitly answer it, you discover you've been performing an implicit answer. Safety, status, shits and giggles, domination. Something.

I'm sure of that. I'm unsure to what degree the answers we arrive at are a matter of choice.

This book made a big impression on me. I read it when I was a lot dumber, and wonder what I'd make of it now. Too many un-read books to re-read it, though.

I have found a lot of alpha in being good at recognizing quality people.

It seems simple, but this thread gives many examples of why it's not. Assuming that the hated tribe is composed entirely of idiots is the most trivial illustration, but there are others, most of them rooted in the almost overwhelming need to feel good about yourself, about the rightness of your own beliefs and to justify the things that you're doing and want to do.

Hard swim upstream of that, but worth it. You make better and more useful friends, if nothing else.

Yes. It takes a deeper interaction before the tyranny of small differences sets in. Bitcoiners mos def do not get along if you wait long enough, as the recent OP_RETURN thing amply demonstrates. Many such examples.

You have my axe!

This is one of the SN posts I'm proudest of. Glad you remember it.

Great insight.

Here's an even more unsettling implication: imagine how basically everyone in the world doesn't want all this shit being mailed to them, and yet, for the reasons you say, we just live with it. So it's this insane idiot dance of them mailing you shit (which they would prefer not to do) and you getting the shit (which you would prefer not to get), and throwing it instantly away, and it accumulating in landfills (which we would all, collectively, prefer to not happen).

None of the participants are happy with the outcome, and yet we continue to produce eight zillion tons of garbage while we all soak in it. The human condition, ladies and gentlemen.

So the treasury trick works for the shittiest of shitcoins, too? That's really interesting, since it sort of harpoons the bitcoin narrative that this is a really good idea for the usual maxi reasons and forces us to acknowledge that it's just another flavor of bullshit financial engineering that most of us presumably hate.

A little game I play, because I am a fool, is to look at coinmarketcap from time to time when I'm feeling good about myself and my deep commitment to intellectual honesty. And I see that ETH, SOL, DOGE, and (especially) XRP are all soaring; and despite the usual bitcoiner cope, that people who invested in them have made a pile of fucking money, although the devil is in the details on how much compared to btc; but you can find periods where any of those were just as good or better.

And then I feel much less good about myself.